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Stiff
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INTRODUCTION - STIFF - (Spoiler Thread)
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by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Sep 05, 2013 09:14PM)
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rated it 3 stars
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* New York Times bestseller
* Amazon.com 2003 Editor's Choice book
* Barnes&Noble Discover Great New Writers book
* A Borders Original Voices book
* Winner of the Elle Reader's Prize
* A Best Books of 2003 selection by:
Entertainment Weekly
The San Francisco Chronicle
The Seattle Times
The San Jose Mercury
The Las Vegas Mercury
NPR's "Science Friday"
Mod
"Authoritative, endlessly curious and drolly funny." —Adam Woog, The Seattle Times
"This quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession." —Tara Parker-Pope, The Wall Street Journal
"'Uproariously funny' . . . a book as informative and respectful as it is irreverent and witty." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Riveting. It is impossible to tear one's eyes away from Roach's descriptions." —Chicago Sun-Times
"Surprisingly lively." — The New Yorker
"The author's witty voice breathes new life into the study of human cadavers and their role in research." —The Daily News
"Mary Roach is one of an endangered species: a science writer with a sense of humor. She is able to make macabre funny without looting death of its dignity." —The Denver Post
"A joy to read. . . . This is wonderful stuff." — San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Death may have the last laugh, but, in the meantime, Roach finds merriment in the macabre." —Booklist
"Roach adopts the Michael Moore approach to the unliving . . . by getting very up close and personal with the cadaver industry. . . . Splicing humorous anecdotes and historical tidbits she leaves no corpse unturned." —Maxim
"Roach's conversational tone and her gallows humor bring her subjects to life." —People Magazine
"Roach seems intent on helping us (and herself) get a better handle on the meaning of death, or, at least, on making one's own death meaningful." —Chicago Tribune
"With determined probing, a focused eye, and a delightful sense of humor author Mary Roach has written a compelling study of the history and current use of cadavers." —Richmond Times-Dispatch
"[Stiff] is a fascinating book and, once you pick it up, you won't likely put it down." —Wisconsin State Journal
"[Roach] has written a curiously funny, touching respectful study . . . [she] bravely goes where we wouldn't want to go." —The Tampa Tribune
"Mary Roach's Stiff is genuinely funny and destined to be a classic read." —Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh
"A keen eye for observation of unique and ironic details . . . dead bodies have never been more fascinating." — Express-News, San Antonio
"As fascinating as it is funny, as sensitive as it is probing, Mary Roach's Stiff is above all an important account of how we treat the dead—literally. The research is admirable, the anecdotes carefully chosen, and the prose lively." —Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist
"Droll, dark, and quite wise, Stiff makes being dead funny and fascinating and weirdly appealling." —Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief
"Mary Roach proves what many of us have long suspected: that the real fun in life doesn't start until you're dead. I particularly enjoyed the sections about head transplants, black-market mummies, and how to tell if you're actually dead." —Joe Queenan, author of Balsamic Dreams
Mod
From the chapter "A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste," about plastic-surgery instruction on cadavers:
The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had the occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan. But here are forty of them, one per pan, resting face-up on what looks to be a small pet-food bowl. The heads are for plastic surgeons, two per head, to practice on.... "Isolate the brow as a skin island." The [instructor] speaks slowly, in a flat tone. I'm sure the idea is to sound neither excited and delighted at the prospect of isolating skin islands, nor overly dismayed. The net effect is that he sounds chemically sedated, which seems to me like a good idea.
From the chapter "Life After Death," about forensics and embalming:
Out behind the University of Tennessee Medical center is a lovely, forested grove with squirrels leaping in the branches of hickory trees and birds calling and patches of green grass where people lie on their backs in the sun, or sometimes in the shade, depending on where the researchers put them.
This pleasant Knoxville hillside is a field research facility, the only one in the world dedicated to the study of human decay. The people lying in the sun are dead...
An eye cap is a simple ten-cent piece of plastic. It is slightly larger than a contact lens, less flexible, and considerably less comfortable. The plastic is repeatedly lanced through, so that small, sharp spurs stick up from its surface. The spurs work on the same principle as those steel spikes that threaten Severe Tire Damage on behalf of rental car companies: The eyelid will come down over an eye cap, but, once closed, will not easily open back up. Eye caps were invented by a mortician to help dead people keep their eyes shut. There have been times this morning when I wished that someone had outfitted me with a pair of eye caps. I've been standing around, eyelids up, in the basement embalming room of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science.
From the chapter "Dead Man Driving," about human crash-test dummies:
By and large, the dead aren't very talented. They can't play water polo, or lace up their boots, or maximize market share. They can't tell a joke, and they can't dance for beans. There is one thing dead people excel at. They're very good at handling pain. For instance, UM 006. UM 006 is a cadaver who recently journeyed across Detroit from the University of Michigan to the bioengineering lab at Wayne State University. His job, which he will undertake at approximately 7 p.m. tonight, is to be hit in the shoulder with a linear impactor.
From the chapter "How to Know If You're Dead," about beating-heart cadavers and the scientific search for the soul:
A patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push, flanked by caregivers with long strides and set faces, steadying IVs, pumping ambu bags, barreling into double doors. A gurney with a cadaver commands no urgency. It is wheeled by a single person, calmly and with little notice, like a shopping cart.
For this reason, I thought I would be able to tell when the dead woman was wheeled past...
H. is unique in that she is both a dead person and a patient on the way to surgery. She is what's known as a "beating-heart cadaver," alive and well everywhere but her brain.
message 5:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Sep 05, 2013 09:23PM)
(new)
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rated it 3 stars
Mod
I grew up in a small house in Etna, New Hampshire. My dad was 65 when I was born. My neighbors taught me how to drive a Skidoo and shoot a rifle, though I never made much use of these skills.
I graduated from Wesleyan in 1981, and drove out to San Francisco with some friends. I spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor before landing a half-time PR job at the SF Zoo.
My office was in a trailer next to Gorilla World. On the days when I wasn't taking calls about elephant wart removal surgery or denying rumors that the cheetahs had been sucked dry by fleas, I wrote freelance articles for the local newspaper's Sunday magazine. Eventually, my editors there moved on to bigger things and took me along with them.
I mostly write books these days, but I still write the occasional magazine piece. These have run in Outside, National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as many others too embarrassing to name.
A 1995 article of mine called "How to Win at Germ Warfare" was a National Magazine Award Finalist, and in 1996, my article on earthquake-proof bamboo houses took the Engineering Journalism Award in the general interest magazine category, for which I was, let's be honest, the only entrant. I often write about science, though I don't have a science degree and must fake my way through interviews with experts I can't understand. I also review books for The New York Times.
My first book, Stiff, was an offshoot of a column I wrote for Salon.com. It was sort of a reported humor column, wherein I covered things like vaginal weight-lifting and amputee bowling leagues and the question of how much food it takes to burst a human stomach.
I have no hobbies. I mostly just work on my books and hang out with my family and friends. I enjoy bird-watching--though the hours don't agree with me--backpacking, thrift stores, overseas supermarkets, Scrabble, mangoes, and that late-night "Animal Planet" show about horrific animals such as the parasitic worm that attaches itself to fishes' eyeballs but makes up for it by leading the fish around.
(Source: http://www.maryroach.net/maryroach.html)
message 7:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Sep 05, 2013 09:45PM)
(new)
-
rated it 3 stars
message 8:
by
Bentley, Group Founder, Leader, Chief
(last edited Sep 06, 2013 05:10AM)
(new)
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rated it 3 stars
Mod
Are we reading "Stiff"? Cool book, I'd be glad to re-read. When does the discussion start? (I guess I missed the e-mail)
My Response:
Yes, it will be discussed in October and I am just setting up the threads - the event notification has not gone out yet. But here is the TOC and the Syllabus:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
it was a great book! I just read it in july!
Mod
Well . . . I was holding off starting another discussion group . . . but as usual, I can't resist. I'll have to finish off one of the other 2 books before this starts. I've read this as an audiobook earlier . . . but I LOVE her stuff and will be interested in what others think! It was great read . . . :-)
Read this to help my wife with her anatomy/physiology class. Really enjoyed it.
This will be our first Health-Medicine-Science discussion being moderated by Kathy.